Who Is Selling Consolidation
The figures showing that software is wasted and the products that fix it come from the same industry. That is not a scandal — it is who measures the thing — and it shapes the framing in a specific and checkable way. For a related reference point, Monitask has a guide to remote companies, which is useful when comparing whether a dedicated tool is warranted.
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The two groups
Software management vendors. Their product discovers what an organisation runs, what it costs and who uses it. They produce the detailed waste data — the licence utilisation figures, the duplication counts, the annual waste estimates.
Platform vendors. Their product is what you consolidate onto. Their argument is that one suite replaces several point tools, and it concludes at their pricing.
Both are describing something real. Over half of licences go unused and duplication is common, measured repeatedly by different methods.
What the framing omits
The free step.
Where two tools do one job, choosing one and switching the other off costs nothing. No platform, no management product, no migration.
That option appears in neither pitch, because neither company sells it — and for a small firm it captures most of the available saving.
Also omitted: doing less. A tool cancelled because the task turned out not to need software is a saving with no replacement cost, and it is the largest saving available to a firm that has bought carelessly.
Where the management product is genuinely right
Above a threshold of tools and people.
A firm that cannot list its own subscriptions has a discovery problem, and discovery is what the product does well.
Below that, the discovery is a statement and thirty minutes. Buying a tool to find your tools is a purchase that only makes sense when manual counting has genuinely failed.
The threshold is roughly where nobody can produce the list from memory or from one statement — which for most small firms is not reached.
Reading a consolidation case
Three questions.
Is the duplication real? Five tools for five unrelated tasks is not duplication, and a case built on total count rather than on overlap is measuring the wrong thing.
What is the switching cost? Migration, retraining, the period of running both — routinely absent from the comparison, which then shows a saving that does not exist.
And what does the saving compare against? A comparison against your current spend including tools you have already stopped using is inflated, which is why cancelling comes before consolidating.
The statistics, used properly
For scale, not for benchmarking.
"$21 million annual waste" describes large enterprises and tells a firm with six subscriptions nothing about itself.
"Over half of licences unused" is the useful one, because it is a proportion and it prompts the right question: which of mine.
And the duplication counts — eleven task tools, ten collaboration tools — are useful as a description of how it happens rather than as a target to compare against.
What a small firm should actually do
In order, and the first two are free.
Cancel what nothing depends on. Twenty minutes with a statement.
Switch off duplicates, one of each pair, work moved to the survivor on a stated date.
Right-size what remains — seats down to actual users, tiers down where the reason for the upgrade has passed.
And only then consider whether a platform would help, against a baseline that now reflects reality rather than accumulated waste.
Most firms find nothing left to consolidate after the first three steps, which is the outcome the industry framing makes hardest to reach.
The honest counter-case
Large organisations genuinely have this problem and the products genuinely address it.
Hundreds of applications, most bought outside any central view, is not a situation a spreadsheet resolves — discovery at that scale needs automated discovery.
And the waste figures are not invented. They are measured, by the people who sell the fix, and both halves of that sentence are true.
The objection here is to the transfer — applying enterprise reasoning to a firm with six subscriptions — rather than to the reasoning itself.
The language to notice
Three phrases that indicate the framing rather than the finding.
"Tech stack rationalisation." A programme, with a consultant attached, for what is usually a decision about two overlapping subscriptions.
"Shadow IT." Describes people buying tools without telling anybody, and frames it as a control problem. In a small firm it describes somebody solving their own problem, which is not the same thing and does not need governance.
And "visibility." Genuinely valuable at scale and, below it, a word for a list somebody could write in half an hour.
None of these is dishonest. They are enterprise vocabulary applied to small-business situations, and the vocabulary carries an implied scale of response.
What this site is doing, symmetrically
Arguing that you probably need less, which is also a position with an interest behind it.
The bias is stated and it is worth applying the same reading: a site consistently recommending the smaller option will sometimes recommend something inadequate, exactly as a vendor consistently recommends the larger one.
The check is the same in both directions. Does the source ever argue against its own position? This site's answer is on one page, and pointing at it is fair rather than sufficient. Additional context is available from Harvard Business Review.
The short version
- The waste statistics and the remedies come from the same industry, which is who measures it and shapes how it is framed
- Two groups sell it: software management vendors who find the duplication, and platform vendors who are what you consolidate onto
- Both omit the free step — switching a duplicate off costs nothing and captures most of the saving for a small firm
- Also omitted is cancelling a tool for a task that did not need software, which is the largest saving available
- A management product is right above the threshold where nobody can produce the list manually, which most small firms never reach
- Read any case for real duplication rather than total count, for switching costs, and for what the saving is measured against